The book that inspired Ian Caldwell's bestselling The Rule of Four―discover the secret codes of the best-selling novel! One of the most famous books in the world, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, read by every Renaissance intellectual and referred to in studies of art and culture ever since, was first published in English by Thames &amp; Hudson in 1999. It is a strange, pagan, pedantic, erotic, allegorical, mythological romance relating in highly stylized Italian the quest of Poliphilo for his beloved Polia. The author (presumed to be Francesco Colonna, a friar of dubious reputation) was obsessed by architecture, landscape, and costume―it is not going too far to say sexually obsessed―and its 174 woodcuts are a primary source for Renaissance ideas on both buildings and gardens. In 1592 an attempt was made to produce an English version but the translator gave up. The task has been triumphantly accomplished by Joscelyn Godwin, who succeeds in reproducing all its wayward charm and arcane learning in language accessible to the modern reader. 174 black-and-white illustrations

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream

Arts & Photography

Joscelyn Godwin

Francesco Colonna

History & Criticism

Thames&Hudson

The Strife of Love in a Dream: Being the Elizabethan Version of the First Book of the Hypnerotomachia of Francesco Colonna (Classic Reprint)

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

Forgotten Books

Excerpt from The Strife of Love in a Dream: Being the Elizabethan Version of the First Book of the Hypnerotomachia of Francesco ColonnaI did not know he wanted it, when it would have been much at his service, for love, and the menage'ife would not have been justly vexed by extravagance V ile dammim, after all, the loss of the book, if we look only at the literary merits of the Hypneroiomaefiia in Elizabethan English. The translation is ignorant and unintelligible: a meaning cannot be made out of much of it, and the sense, when the translator does deviate into sense, is not always that of his original. We have re printed it with absolute fidelity. The idea of altering the punctuation was mooted, but where the translator's meaning was obscure, the original text cast no light on it whatever; so any alteration would have been conjectural. Thus the volume reappears with all its sins on its head, except the horrors of its barbarous illustrations. For these miseries, a few examples copied from the original have been substituted. Obvious misprints alone have been corrected, and the text is reproduced from the example in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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